The Cells: the creation of a novel from an interdisciplinary writing practice, in dialogue with Julia Kristeva, to reimagine cancer and care

The Cells is a practice-based research project narrativising an experienced trajectory of cancer through the lens of care. The autofictional novel is interdisciplinary in nature, bringing together both science and art, and theory and imagination. Structured episodically throughout twenty months or so of living with disease, it moves from the initial (terminal) diagnosis of the narrator/carer’s partner; through the successes and failures of subsequent treatments; to an inevitable, yet ambiguous, denouement. My creative practice seeks to present a new kind of illness narrative. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s ideas about care and the abject, I reimagine care as a gift and show how caring for an other with cancer, although insufferable at times, leads to a fundamentally beneficial contact with an “ultimate otherness”. A cancer patient is I argue, colonised (at least) twice: first by the disease and then by biomedicine. Authentic paperwork, frequently juxtaposed with lived emotion in my novel, problematises a hierarchical rift in medical discourse. Through its hybridity, my text aims to heal this rift; the medical story is necessarily humanised, but the narrative is also enriched by the use of the biological as a compositional tool. The poetical, at times retaliative or a refuge from the dehumunisation/hierarchisation of biomedicine, can also be seen to emanate from what I call a “biological jouissance”; new forms of narration arise from textual recreations of internal processes, treatments and effects.